Every year, social media posts come out during that period of time between Christmas and the beginning of the new year asking what they’re supposed to do with their idle hours. Most years, those days are filled with companionship and social engagements, but I found myself with a completely unoccupied Saturday this year. I went to the mall to get my calendar for the new year from the kiosk there, took a long bath, and then went to my local video store, where I wandered the aisles for over half an hour before finally settling on The Lady Vanishes; I grabbed dinner from the birria truck that’s on the same block and went home, settled in, and quite enjoyed it. It was still early in the evening, however, and I convinced myself to go back to the video store and get another movie, since they operate on a monthly subscription model and you can, essentially, rent as many movies as you want, simply one at a time. While walking past the bar next door to the video store, I ran into some neighbors that I rarely see, and one of them was vehemently excited to recommend the recent Ripley series starring Andrew Scott. This, along with a recent trip to the Austin Film Society to see Cinema Paradiso and thus once again seeing the poster for Der amerikanische Freund that hangs above one of the urinals there, I decided to check out the Wim Wenders adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s third Ripley novel, Ripley’s Game.
The first thing to note about this film is that, despite first billing, Tom Ripley is not the main character. Also, the image that is conjured in your mind when you think of Ripley as a character—successful in his ongoing criminal enterprises and sociopathic activities due to his suave sophistication and urbane, well-cultured manner—is not the Tom Ripley that is portrayed herein by Dennis Hopper. This Ripley is slovenly, neurotic, unsure of himself, and unkempt, a far cry from the character as portrayed in the novels and in most adaptations. As in the novel (based on the summaries I’ve consulted; I only ever read Talented, and that was many years ago), Ripley is living in Europe off of stashed funds while continuing to grift. These days, he’s got an American painter producing “newly discovered” works from a deceased artist, which he then takes to Germany and auctions off to great profit. During the auction of the newest “Derwatt” piece, Ripley overhears Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) attempting to convince his friend not to bid on the painting, citing that the colors are slightly off and that it may be a forgery. Ripley attempts to introduce himself to Zimmerman, but is rebuffed coldly, as Zimmerman does not shake his proffered hand and instead simply says “I’ve heard of you.” Ripley then learns from the manager of the auction house, Gantner, that Zimmerman was once a great restoration artist as well as a master frame-maker, but that his restoration work has suffered due to Zimmerman’s struggle with terminal leukemia, and Zimmerman’s wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) has had to come to work at the auction house to help supplement their income for his ongoing treatment.
When Ripley is approached by French mobster Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) about a hit on one of his American competitors, Ripley sends him to Zimmerman out of spite over the latter man’s curtness, and even sends a forged telegram to Zimmerman that indicates his condition is worsening. Despite initial resistance, Zimmerman is lured to Paris by Minot with the promise of seeing a specialist there; documents are falsified that maintain the ruse that Zimmerman’s time is growing short, and he is eventually convinced to kill Minot’s rival. As Marianne grows suspicious of what is really going on, Ripley and Zimmerman meet again, and ZImmerman’s apology for his previous behavior leads to Ripley softening toward him, and when he learns that Minot intends to have Zimmerman perform a second murder (and one with a much higher risk of being caught), he tries to convince the gangster not to, unsuccessfully. Wracked with guilt but feeling the hand of death on his shoulder and desiring to ensure that his widow and their young son Daniel are cared for, Zimmerman agrees to the second hit. When he botches it, Ripley appears and saves Zimmerman’s life, and the two work together to get rid of the evidence.
It took some time for me to get into this one. It’s not what you would think of when you imagine a Highsmith adaptation. As mentioned above, Hopper is not the platonic ideal of Tom Ripley, and adjusting to that difference takes some time. What salves this change is that our main character here is Zimmerman. In the plot description above, Ripley’s name comes up a lot, but a lot of his action is invisible and offscreen, while the film follows Zimmerman for most of its runtime. What we see of Ripley is minimal; he’s neurotic, self-obsessed, and does little to ingratiate himself with those around him. For the first half of the film, what we know of him is that he’s a con man with no real people skills, and he spends his lonely hours recording nonsensical self-pitying monologues on cassette (which were largely improvised by Hopper) and then listens back to them later while driving around aimlessly. Zimmerman, on the other hand, has very clear motivations and beliefs, and watching his descent from loving father and husband to secretive, tortured man is heartbreaking.
At a NYE party, I mentioned having seen this one to a friend who I know to be a big Ripley appreciator, which led to a larger discussion about how Winders’s work (with which he is more familiar than I) is often quiet, solemn, and—depending upon the viewer—kind of boring, but with at least one magnificent sequence that makes it worthwhile. For Der amerikanische Freund, the standout sequence comes around the halfway mark, when Zimmerman, having just been given the (false) news that his health has taken a turn for the worst and opts to accept Minot’s offer in the hopes not of getting treatment but of making sure that his family is cared for after his death. There is a solid ten minute dialogue-free sequence in which Zimmerman slowly and purposely follows his victim as he transfers from one train platform to another and boards different metros, a reluctant stalker, before he finally works up the nerve to shoot the man. Once the deed is done, despite Minot’s instructions to simply walk away calmly and quietly and disappear into a crowd, Zimmerman flees the scene, sprinting like a madman, and we see this flight play out over closed circuit surveillance footage, at a remove. It’s fantastic, one of the greatest versions of this kind of scene that I have ever seen. It’s also a fun subversion of Zimmerman’s constant running throughout the film; virtually everywhere he goes, he’s never moving at a pace slower than a brisk jog, except when he’s with his family. This is a nice little bit of characterization, that he knows he has a finite amount of time left in his life and he wants to spend the quiet, slow moments with his wife and son, rushing through all of his other obligations to get to what’s important. Zimmerman never stops, and it helps propel the film forward, even in its quiet moments. It’s a strange chapter in the saga of Highsmith adaptations, but one that’s ultimately very compelling.
I really took my time picking out a movie at the video store last weekend. It was that Saturday between Christmas and the new year, and I had spent the day in solitude, which is not normally my way. I went to the mall to pick out my new sexy wall calendar for the year (you have to wait until after Christmas to buy one for yourself, otherwise someone may get one for you), idly wandered for a bit thinking about the lyrics of “Hard Candy Christmas,” and went to a coffee shop to see a friend who works there but who wasn’t there. I went to the home of a friend who had given me a very nice bath bomb for the holiday and offered up their modern, fancy bathtub for my use while they were out of town, and I sat on their balcony and stared into space. Then I wandered the aisles, trying to think of what I wanted to watch that night, with each DVD box that I picked up making me realize I would rather watch this or that with my friend once he got back to town. I spent a lot of time debating over the director wall and finally settled on a Hitchcock I had never seen.
The Lady Vanishes is the last of the master’s works that he completed in England before he came to the states and engaged with the Hollywood system. Released in 1938, the film follows the misadventure of one Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a Londoner who has spent her last few weeks of being single skiing with her girlfriends at a town in the fictional country of Bandrika. On her final night, she meets the charming Mrs. Froy, a governess who is returning back to England now that her charges have outgrown their need for her tutelage, and she also encounters the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave, father of Vanessa and Lynn, in his first film role), who is in the room above her and recording information about a local folk dance, which disturbs her rest. With the rail lines snowed in, two proper English snoots named Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, two of the most English names I have ever seen) are also forced to stay at the same inn, where they fret over the dwindling menu and the increasing unlikelihood that they will make it to any of the cricket matches that are on their agenda. That night, unbeknownst to any of the travellers, a serenader below Mrs. Froy’s window is strangled. The next morning, an attempt is made on Mrs. Froy’s life by someone pushing a potted plant onto her head from an upper window, but Iris is struck instead. Mrs. Froy helps her onto the train and they find themselves in a compartment together. Ultimately, the two wind up having tea and getting to know each other a bit better before Iris takes a short rest. When she awakes, however, she finds Mrs. Froy missing and, worse, everyone in the compartment claims that there never was a Mrs. Froy. As she searches the train for the woman, she happens upon Gilbert again and reluctantly accepts his assistance. The two of them also encounter renowned surgeon Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), who attempts to persuade Iris that perhaps the whole thing is the result of her earlier blow to the head. Elsewhere, however, an English barrister named Todhunter orders his mistress (Linden Travers, cheekily credited as playing “Mrs.” Todhunter) not to admit that she saw Froy earlier, lest their involvement in an investigation reveal their affair. Who was Mrs. Froy? Where has she gone? Who is involved?
As a longtime fan of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, I had long thought very little about this film, as I assumed it would follow the same plot as that program’s episode “Into Thin Air,” which was likewise about a young woman who is told that an older woman (in this case, her mother) was never present at the hotel in which the two are lodging. This turns out to have a completely different narrative, but according to some sources, the novel upon which The Lady Vanishes was based, Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, was partially inspired by the urban legend of The Vanishing Hotel Room, which was also more explicitly recapitulated in the aforementioned “Into Thin Air,” so it turns out I wasn’t pulling that connection out of, um, thin air. I would recommend that episode as a companion to this film; it’s one of the most cinematic, and makes great use of the minimal sets that the TV production would have had access to. Visually, this is one of Hitchcock’s most striking and sumptuous of his pre-Hollywood era. Although the modern eye can’t help but notice that the Bandrikan town in the film’s opening is a miniature, it’s a very high quality one that allows for some beautiful sweeping shots that move from the train yard to the inn. The rear projection work for the scenes set aboard the train are very effective at conveying a perfect closed loop of a narrative intertwined with a constant momentum, which is quite a lot of fun.
Lockwood and Redgrave are fantastic together. When we first meet Iris, she comes off as a bit of a brat, being treated like royalty by the staff of the inn, who treat the milling crowd in the lobby as an afterthought. Gilbert, for this part, comes off as a cad from the outset as well, as it’s not unreasonable for Iris to request that his guests cease stomp-dancing on the floor directly above her bed. Their initial antipathy is the kind of electric interplay that the nostalgic crowd laments as lacking from contemporary film, and the way that it blossoms into a romance between them is what we go to the movies for, baby. Their interplay would be comic relief enough without the stuffy Caldicott and Charters, but the latter two are merely part of a truly iconic cast of supporting characters. I was particularly taken with “Mrs.” Todhunter, whose moral convictions and equivocations wield the power of life and death at points, even though she herself is unaware of the implications of both her silence and her admissions. Catherine Lacey, who comes into the film as the Nun late in the film, is also a world class addition, and I loved every moment we got to spend with her. The presentation is exciting, the cast is marvelous, and the mystery is wonderful.
One of the weirdest ways that the right wing griftosphere has managed to warp the minds of otherwise leftward and progressive young folks who are insufficiently critical of the online sources that inform their beliefs in the past couple of years has been the age gap discourse. In a very short period of time, we’ve gone from debating separating the art from the artist with regards to legitimate predators like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski to fully accepting the specious pseudoscience about when a brain is “fully formed” based on a tweet about a tweet about a tweet about a peer-reviewed study. I’m not going to pretend like we don’t live in a predatory world, especially for those who lack (or have been prevented from having) the ability to advocate for themselves. But I also can’t pretend that every time I see another young YouTuber fully and uncritically spread the idea that all age gap relationships are inherently unethical or immoral, it makes my heart preemptively hurt for all the ways that these uninformed blanket ideas are going to hurt the people that the purveyors of social commentary think they’re helping. If the right can get the left to eat itself by pushing the idea that women can’t make their own decisions at 18, or at 25, then they’ll eventually move the Overton window far enough to get people to think that women can’t make their own decisions at any age, or use this same logic to prevent trans people from living as their most authentic selves at any age. We’re only going to see it get worse. Luckily, Humphrey Bogart (born 1899) and Lauren Bacall (born 1924) have been dead long enough that (hopefully), they will escape the scrutiny of the neo-Puritans in Breadtube clothing.
Dark Passage was the third of four film that Bogey and Bacall made together during their marriage, and it’s a great little low-commitment noir. Bogart plays Vince Parry, a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife, and Bacall plays Irene Jansen, a woman who is sympathetic to him because of her own father’s false murder conviction. When Parry escapes from San Quentin, he first is picked up by a man named Baker (Clifton Young), but when Baker overhears the radio bulletin about Parry’s escape, the two scuffle and Parry steals his clothing. Before he does anything too rash, Irene appears on the scene and manages to secret him into San Francisco past the manhunt. While she’s out shopping for clothes, her snoopy friend Madge (Agnes Moorhead) appears at her door and, hearing the record playing inside, insists that Irene open up, until Parry has to pretend that he’s Irene’s gentleman caller. As it turns out, Madge and Parry have a history of their own; she wanted him and tried to induce him to an affair, and she provided the damning evidence (read: perjury) at Parry’s trial. Madge is also the ex-fiance of Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is now pursuing Irene. Parry leaves Irene’s and meets a sympathetic cabby named Sam (Tom D’Andrea) who sets Parry up with a discredited back alley plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) to change his face. Unfortunately, upon awakening, Parry returns to the home of the friend who promised to house him during recovery only to find the man murdered, and Parry once again at the end of a frame job.
The general consensus about this one is that the first half is much more exciting than the second, and I can see why. For the first forty minutes, the film is shot almost entirely in first person from Parry’s point of view, and it’s such a refreshingly modern and unconventional stylistic device that you can’t help but marvel at it, even nearly seven decades later. It’s Bogart’s voice throughout, of course, but we only ever see “Vincent Parry” as a photo in the newspaper, and the only time that Parry is on screen pre-face change is when he’s in the back of Sam’s cab and is backlit so that not even the outline of a face can be seen, which lends this one a great noir gravitas. This also allows for the opportunity for Bacall to make long, lingering stares straight down the barrel of the camera, as if she’s looking straight into your soul as she tells you that she believes in your innocence; she’s absolute magic here. While Parry is getting the surgery, he undergoes a marvelously psychedelic subjective dream sequence, with great kaleidoscopic effects and double (and triple) exposure overlays that also manages to feel very modern and fresh. The issue for a lot of people seems to be that this is where they start to lose interest, and the complete abandonment of those ahead-of-their-time visual choices as the rest of the movie plays out as a much more straightforward noir picture. I didn’t mind this, though, as I found the narrative sufficiently compelling and remained invested in whether Parry would ever be able to escape from the city and if Irene would be able to join him, as well as figuring out who actually did kill the late Mrs. Parry and Parry’s friend George. And the film is not completely without some very exciting shots to follow, especially as the action picks up; Parry is nearly apprehended by the police at one point, there’s a sequence of dangerous driving, and there are even two separate fall deaths with surprisingly decent dummy work. I liked it quite a lot.
Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015. The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered. There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time. I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above). It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise. Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies. The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.
That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life. She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery. She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle. The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture. Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.” Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life. Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky. Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera. Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities. Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol. Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes. It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.
I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city. Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly. McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet. She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness. She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her. Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies. It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival. I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere. It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.
Nosferatu: I’m still digesting this one. A technical achievement, to be certain. Dreamlike in a hypnotic way, such that it almost lulls one to sleep in the same way that Suspiriadoes—yes. Marvelously composed and photographed, without a doubt. But did I like it? It’s been nearly a week since I saw it and I’m still not certain. I’m digesting it, but I think I may not have enjoyed it at all. I’ll have more thoughts, I think, by the time that we record our first Lagniappe podcast episode of the new year. In the meantime, read Brandon’s review here.
She is Conann: An irreverent reimagining of the mythology of Conan (the Barbarian, the Destroyer, the Cimmerian, and more) as a series of reincarnated women, this one is going to end up on several of this year’s lists (and undoubtedly at the top of Brandon’s). It’s worth seeking out. Read Brandon’s review here.
Madame Web: Look, I love this movie. I love every strange little moment of it. I love how awkward Dakota Johnson is with children, I love her bizarre relationship with canned soda, and I love her whispering “I hope the spiders were worth it, mom.” I shaved my face for the first time in over five years just so that I could portray this character for Halloween. I loved it so much on my first screening of it that I wrotea 5-star review, and then I also forced Alli and Brandon to watch it so that we could discuss it on the podcast(they were … less interested). This movie changed my brain chemistry, but I know what would happen to me in the street if I put this where I really wanted to on this countdown (hint: it would be number one).
20.Civil War
For a long time, I viewed people who enjoyed clowning on Alex Garland as goofy weirdos lacking media literacy. With the release of information about his next picture, Warfare, which at this time appears to be yet another apologia for America’s practice of undermining the sovereignty of other nations, I may have to reevaluate. Alternatively, that film may end up being another subversion of what it appears to be, just as Civil War is. I did wait to see it until it would reap zero financial benefit from me due to the studio’s choice to use AI in generating posters for the film (I’m not going to give any ground on this front), and although I feared it would be too engrossed in “both sides” discourse about a potential future for the nation, I was pleased that it was nothing of the sort. In a movie for which politics is so solidly a part of its foundation, it isn’t about its onscreen politics as much as it is about the politics of observation. To paraphrase Brandon from one of our podcast episodes, this is a movie about the psychological complexity of those who document humanity in its moments of most extreme inhumanity. Decades ago, Frantz Fanon wrote “Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor,” which is something that feels more relevant now than it ever has before, especially in light of our ongoing rightward shift and the contemporary legacy media treatment of the brave souls putting their lives on the line for the liberation of Palestine. What Civil War does is explore that concept through the lens of photojournalism, following a group of people whose lives are spent in the pursuit of unearthing and exposing the worst things that human beings do to one another, while never taking direct action to prevent those atrocities. None of the characters here are cowardly, as they throw themselves into the worst situations imaginable in order to ensure that the horrors thereof are not occluded behind the fog of war, so we must ask if they are traitors, and if so, against what? Read Brandon’s review here.
19. Gasoline Rainbow
An unexpected gem that I managed to catch at SXSW, there’s nothing “new” about Gasoline Rainbow. In conversation with a much less meaningful and thoughtful picaresque that came out this year, this is almost the platonic ideal of a coming of age indie, but that lack of novelty doesn’t detract from the overall quality. This is a road picture about teenagers and starring teenagers, all unknowns, whose real lives seem to form and inform the characters that they’re playing. Their dreams are realistically small: to escape from their isolated home town for a part of the last summer that they have together before they enter the crushing adult life that they see around them. There are misadventures and setbacks, but not much in the way of tension; there’s never a moment where you fear for their safety on the road, there’s never a cut back to a concerned parent panicking about their child or trying to find them, and the question of whether they’ll get to the coast as they are trying to do is largely irrelevant. Even if there’s no one here who reminds you of who you were as a teenager, you’ll still recognize a time that you’ve left behind, and find both melancholy and triumph in watching a group of kids prepare to move on from it as well. Read my review here.
18. It’s What’s Inside
This remains a film that is difficult to talk about without giving away too much of its premise, so in order to preserve the early-in-the-film narrative train-jump, I’ll try to explain its vibe. This is a film about how regret and envy so frequently lead to self-damnation, but also about how some amount of acceptance of those failures as part of human nature can allow us to vault over our failings into something different. It’s also frequently quite inventive, as one of the film’s recurring stylistic choices is to have multiple characters try to recount events from the past and have the visualization of the various remembrances, corrections, and fuzzy details be edited in real time to match the dialogue. It’s Rashomon for the generation of short attention spans, it’s Alice Sheldon’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” for those who are currently living through the dystopian reality of self-actualization via social media’s psychologically predatory algorithms, and it’s Bodies Bodies Bodies for those who want that same “trapped at a party you can’t leave” feeling but with an unexpected science fiction bent. Read my review here.
17. Wicked Little Letters
In interbellum England, the friendship between staid, repressed, religious busybody Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman) and her neighbor, the recently-arrived Irish migrant Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), has fallen apart. Although the younger woman’s brusque, vulgar manner initially brought a refreshing air that loosened Swan’s uptight rigidity, a misunderstanding and underhanded action on Swan’s father’s part has soured their relationship to the point of bitterness. And it’s based on a true story! You might be wondering why a film with a plot summary that reads like thirty percent of the content of BBC’s iPlayer app is on this list; it’s because this movie is filthily hilarious. In this little community, someone is posting “poison pen” letters to various upstanding (and not so upstanding) citizens that are riddled with the most inventive invectives that would make even the late Jerry Springer blush. In his review, Brandon nominated the film as a kind of John Waters movie for the Downton Abbey crowd, and I had a very similar thought during my screening, as I couldn’t help but think about the title character’s obscene phone calls in Serial Mom. Of course, Edith is the recipient of a large portion of these letters and Rose is blamed and set up to take the fall, while the film also follows Anjana Vasan as the officer attempting to solve the mystery despite an obstinately patriarchal justice system, the incompetence of which is an impediment at every step. Definitely worth the watch.
16. Strange Darling
This one has gotten a pretty mixed reception, and I can see the validity in the complaints. Told in an anachronic order, Strange Darling is, on the one hand, a film predicated on “subverting expectations,” as its various twists rely upon the viewer entering the narrative with certain preconceived notions about who commits violence against whom. The problem is that those “preconceived notions” are simply an observation about violence against women in our society, and which are thus not biases so much as they are statistics. It could be argued that this is entirely the wrong time and social climate for a movie that trivializes violence against women; it would be uncharitable but arguably accurate to call it incel-adjacent. What I’m trying to say here is that no one who is calling this movie sexist is inherently wrong, even if my reading is different. On the other hand, Strange Darling as a film is something that I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of. Former actor JT Mollner has a keen eye for what works that was no doubt honed by his years on the other side of the camera (along with fellow actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi), and every bit of this is a technical achievement, from sound design to the decisions of where to cut each nonlinear chapter to ensure maximum engagement and interest to the casting. Willa Fitzgerald’s performance as “The Lady” is stunning here, and all of the potential that viewers saw in her in The Fall of the House of Usher is on full display as she alternatively plays cunning, confused, abused, and malicious, often all on top of one another. (Confession: I did watch some of the Scream MTV program that she was apparently the star of, because of my long-documented love of Scream, but if you put a gun to my head and demanded that I remember a single detail from it other than that it featured Tracy Middendorf, I’d just have to say “shoot me.”) Kyle Gallner is also quite fun here, as he’s demanded to play malice at points and vulnerability at others, and manages it with aplomb, even if he is outshone by his co-star. It’s funny, scary, and sexy. For an alternative opinion, check out Brandon’s review here.
15. I Saw the TV Glow
I came to be a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan through a fairly roundabout way. For my 2002 birthday, I got an Xbox, which came with a yearlong subscription to the official Xbox magazine, which in turn contained a demo disc with every issue. Sometime that summer, I got the disc with the demo of the upcoming Buffy video game on it, and I enjoyed it enough that I saved up to buy the game itself when it came out. I was completely out of the loop on Buffy, the characters, and the associated lore, but I loved the game so much that when I discovered that the show was in late night syndication on our local Fox affiliate, I started recording it every weekend. Growing up in an incredibly strict Christian household, my ability to watch it depended upon my ability to keep this newfound love a secret from my father, who had already had a conniption about the BtVS video game’s Game Over screen simply using the word “Resurrecting” as it reloaded to your last savepoint. This is one of the few instances in which my love for something “feminine” wasn’t contentious because of that femininity, but there were plenty of other examples of my being punished for having insufficiently masculine interests which I could detail but we’ve already come this far without talking about the actual film on the list, so I’ll try to move a little faster. In the winter of 2007, my bandmate, neighbor, and friend Alicia and I were living in the same fourplex, and we would often convince ourselves to get out and get some exercise by “going on patrol” like Buffy did, complete with stakes that we hid up our sleeves; when we didn’t have gas that winter because of our slumlord, we would pool our money together so she (who was of age) could get us a bottle of Southern Comfort, which we would drink until we weren’t cold anymore and fall asleep watching my Buffy DVDs, including the same box set that TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun posted a photo of on their Twitter. The show meant a lot to me, and I dearly wish that I had the opportunity to craft the kind of love letter for it that Schoenbrun has with I Saw the TV Glow, especially since, if I tried to do it now, it would only read as a ripoff of their film. I see so much of myself in Justice Smith’s Owen: my secrecy, the constancy of self-denial while living in the shadow of an ignorant and rage-fueled father, the discovery of an escapist fantasy through associated material rather than the text itself, and the escape to within the fantasy of not being alone in the world and how sharing that fantasy world with another person mitigates that loneliness, even over great distance and after great time. I understand that this blurb isn’t really about the movie as much as it is my relationship with the metatext, but here we are. I saw I Saw the TV Glow, and in so doing, I saw both myself and the me that might have been. Read Brandon’s review here.
14. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
I don’t have a lot to add to my thoughts on this one, as we talked about it so recently on a Lagniappe episode of the podcast. Check out our conversation about it here.
13. The People’s Joker
At Thanksgiving with friends this year, one of my closest companions was venting about how much he hated this one. Earlier in the year, I reconnected with an old lover (whose opinions I greatly respect) over coffee who asked me “Did you really like The People’s Joker?” with great incredulity. And look—I get it. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of images from this film that, taken out of context, would look like a feverish nightmare or a badly rendered student film. But film is more than images, and I’ve rarely seen Roger Ebert’s adage that films “are like a machine that generates empathy” come true so clearly in a director’s work. If there’s anyone in this world who’s earned the right to be sick to fucking death of Batman and Batman-associated products and projects, it would be me, a man who spent this entire year watching so, so, so many DC animated films. And yet, after getting so sick of typing the word “Batman” that I was convinced I would have an aneurysm if I ever had to do it again, I’m here, doing just that. Writer/director/star Vera Drew has made something truly transformative here, taking pieces of the narrative surrounding one of the most well-known characters in Western fiction and thus one of the most widely shared common cultural touchstones and using those building blocks to craft one of the most personal, confessional, and intimate portraits of the self ever committed to film. It’s a marvel. Read my review here.
12. Dune: Part Two
From my review: “This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there[….] Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more.”
11. Last Things
From my review: “Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet).”
10. Monkey Man
From my review: “Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well[….] The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.”
9. Love Lies Bleeding
From my review: “Where this film picks up the torch from [director Rose] Glass’s earlier work is in the way that we are once again made privy to the internal life of an emotionally and mentally unwell person. Jackie is a fascinating character. When we first meet her, she’s using her body to get what she needs, and is at peace with that. She has history, but no origin; the earliest part of her life that she mentions is being adopted at age thirteen (by parents that no longer speak to her and who call her a “monster”), and she tells Lou that she turned to bodybuilding as a way to change her body due to fatphobic bullying. Like Maud [from Glass’s earlier film St. Maud], she’s running from something, but unlike her, she also has a goal in mind and is relying on herself to get there, self-actualizing where Maud turned to a hollow, false spirituality. […] There should be no mistaking that this is still a brutal movie. It’s not one for those with queasy stomachs, and I’m not just talking about all of the disgusting mullets (of which there are … many), […] but just in case you’re somehow floating around out there with the idea that this is more romance than grit, I want to make it clear that this is a ferocious, vicious piece of work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
It’s a genuine puzzle to me why this movie isn’t more fondly remembered. Was it simply that all the love that people had for Fury Road had died down in the near-decade interlude between that film and this one? Do people have Anya Taylor-Joy fatigue? (Couldn’t be me.) Is it that, as we get closer and closer to a potential future that’s as apocalyptically brutal as this one, the appeal of this kind of film is sputtering out like an engine that’s nearing an empty tank? This movie was a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that was easily the equal of Fury Road. I love this Furiosa bildungsroman, the way that she had as close to a luxurious experience as possible after her childhood capture, the way that she narrowly avoided becoming one of Immortan Joe’s sex slaves and instead found herself among the rabble and forged her way up through talent and ingenuity. It’s truly epic, a Ben-Hur filled with mutants that trades in chariots for chrome. Read my review here.
7. La Bête
I’ve been recommending this to everyone that I know with the description that it’s “like a mean-spirited Cloud Atlas.” That film (and David Mitchell’s novel of the same name from which it is adapted), spans six stories across an array of different time periods: near-future Seoul, an ocean voyage during the era of American chattel slavery, 1930s Belgium, a future post-society Hawai’i, etc. In each one of these times and places, the same group of actors portray different characters, an indication to the audience that these scenarios are occupied by the same souls which are destined to reunite in some way in every reincarnation. It’s a beautiful thing there, this eternal recurrence. In La Bête (aka The Beast), this constancy and continuity of being tethered to the same “soulmate” throughout all of time is instead a source of horror, a kind of damnation in which one could find themselves trapped in an eternal, recurring loop of being forced to deal with the same shitty man for every foreseeable lifetime. Léa Seydoux does phenomenal work as a woman who, feeling stuck in a rut, finds herself digging into an even more existential hole when she undergoes a procedure to “cleanse” her DNA, which only serves to expose her to her past lives and the choices thereof. A intriguing recurring concept of “dolls” appears throughout; her husband in the 1910 timeframe is a dollmaker, the 2014 version of herself housesits at a place with a strange animatronic doll toy, and the future version of herself is given a companion in the form of a fully adult human woman who acts as her “doll.” This is a dense text, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Read Brandon’s review here.
6. Problemista
Not a week goes by that I don’t think about this movie. Julio Torres is a delight, both behind and in front of the camera, and his main character here is just awkward enough to be lovable and delightful, meek in a way that generates empathy rather than frustration at his inability to stand up for himself. As his mentor/nemesis, Tilda Swinton is an utterly terrifying MegaKaren, the likes of whom would send shivers down the spine of any person who’s ever worked in retail or food service; her completely scattered attention and deep lack of self- or situational awareness coupled with a hair-trigger temper and an infallible sense of being correct make her one of the best realized human beings I have ever seen in a film. A truly wonderful debut feature. Read my review here.
5. The Substance
People seem to have really turned on The Substance in record time, but you won’t find me among their number. A fun little fable about self-hatred, the fear of aging, the intersection of ageism and sexism in the dominant culture, and obsession with the past, this is a perfect mixture of many elements that synthesize together into something new and fresh (and monstrous). We have no term other than “body horror” to describe something like this, and while that’s not an incorrect way to describe this gem, it’s more about how being alive and made of meat is disgusting, and the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and the things that our self-hatred can drive us to do to ourselves are stomach-churning. My estimation of this one has only gone up since I saw it, and I think that its penetration of the cultural zeitgeist will make it the 2024 film most likely to be revisited in the years to come. Read my review here.
4. Kinds of Kindness
The Swampflix crew at large went gaga over Poor Things last year (I, unfortunately, was not able to catch a screening until after the start of 2024), and I’ve seen comparatively little love for Kinds of Kindness out and about in the world. Perhaps it came too closely on the heels of Yorgos Lanthimos’s most recent triumph, but this little triptych of oddities was right up my alley. These three stories all appealed to one of my favorite things. “The Death of R.M.F.” feels like Lanthimos’s take on Richard Kelly’s The Box, wherein we see people’s lives manipulated by forces that they could resist but which their loneliness and insecurities lead them to subject themselves to. “R.M.F. is Flying” reads like an Outer Limits episode written by Oliver Sachs, in which a man is convinced a rescued woman is not his missing wife, to tragic ends. Finally, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” is all about a cult running all over Southern Louisiana trying to find the messiah, which is so up my alley it feels like it came out of one of my dreams. Read my review here.
3. Longlegs
I’ve been meeting a lot of Longlegs haters in my real life. In November, I visited New Orleans and reunited with an old grad school buddy who was virulent in his hatred of it, and at a recent Christmas party, everyone was fairly shocked that I had such fond feelings for this one. The truth is, I don’t care that this one lifts so much from Silence of the Lambs. I don’t care that there were people laughing at Cage’s performance. I don’t care that the totemic dolls and their associated powers were left as an element of narrative ambiguity. I love horror movies, and there are so few that manage to shake me so much that, when I was home alone later, I had to turn the lights on. I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Read my review here.
2. Hundreds of Beavers
From my review: “Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie.”
1. Mars Express
There was a moment during the early part of my screening of Mars Express where my viewing companion mentioned how much the film reminded him of Westworld, and I mentioned that the plot (to that point) was more reminiscent of Blade Runner, only to learn that he had never heard of the 1982 classic. Luckily, our local arthouse was screening Ridley Scott’s take on android independence the following month, and it was a delight to see that film again with my friend and through his fresh eyes. Not everyone is lucky enough to have this opportunity, but if you want a similar experience, I can’t recommend Mars Express more highly. The film, which is animated and French, opens as a noir thriller about a recovering alcoholic detective and, for all intents and purposes, a cybernetic ghost of her late partner; the two of them are in pursuit of the killer of a “jailbreaking” hacker—that is, a person who uses their computer skills to liberate robots (both androids and less humanoid mechanical beings) from the servitude for which they were designed. From there, it dives into a world in which man and machine “live” side by side, in which the mechanisms that outlive (and serve as host for the minds of) their creators are just as fallible as flesh. To cease being made of meat and replace synapses with silicon doesn’t fix the mistakes of the past, and true change may require the rejection of the material world altogether. This was absolutely my favorite movie of the year. Read Brandon’s review here.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a monstrosity. Like the antimatter wave that threatens the (multi)cosmos in its narrative, it sprawls – cancerous, devouring everything. It’s not badly made; if anything, it’s above average, but it’s working very hard to try and duplicate the successful interfilm structural scaffolding that characterized the MCU when it was at its most culturally relevant, and coming up short. Hell, it’s falling short of the (mixed) glories of the CW’s “Arrowverse” Crisis event, even when it attempts to duplicate elements of it that can’t be explained away as simply being from the original comic. Although it’s possible that the creative (for a certain value of creativity) concept behind this was to wrap up this franchise given that there’s yet another new DC refresh on the horizon, attempting to pull off the equivalent of a direct-to-video/streaming Endgame after a mere seven films (if we’re being generous and treating The Long Halloween as two separate entities, which I don’t). That’s not even getting into the fact that one of them was set in a different dimension, another was set in outer space, another was set in the future, and Warworld was, well, whatever the hell it was.
The narrative is broken up into three 90ish minute segments. In the first, it mostly revolves around the Flash (Matt Bomer) as he “time trips” through various points in his life: the night he met his wife, Iris; the formation of the Justice League; an excursion to a morally inverted parallel Earth ruled by evil versions of the standard DC hero roster; his and Iris’s wedding day an the interruption thereof by “Harbinger,” a messenger warning of an impending threat to all of existence; and finally, the lead-up to the plan to defeat this looming doom and the failure to complete it in time. It’s at this point that we learn that the reason Barry is skipping around in time is because he has accelerated himself (and Iris) so greatly that they are able to complete the building of a giant vibrational tuning fork that should allow the wave of destruction to pass through the planet harmlessly, living an entire lifetime in the minutes that remained before it arrived.
As we learn in the second segment, which splits its focus between Supergirl and a villain known as “Psycho Pirate,” this success is short-lived. There is not merely one wave of antimatter, but many more that follow, and the network of giant tuning towers requires maintenance, spreading our heroes thin. We also learn that Supergirl actually encountered the Monitor, the heretofore non-interventionist being that’s older than our galaxy and who has finally been stirred into action by the impending destruction of existence, prior to her landing on Earth, and that although they developed a familial bond, she resents him for his inaction regarding the destruction of Krypton. Psycho Pirate is able to manipulate this grievance into causing Supergirl to kill the Monitor, which exacerbates the already perilous situation (it also doesn’t help that the future in which her friends and lover reside has been erased). It is also revealed that the unhoused doomsayer who was rescued by Jon Stewart way back in Beware My Power is none other than our old friend John Constantine, who, following his exit from the end of House of Mystery, taking on the Crisis comics role of Pariah. Further, (in Part 3) we learn that it was an action that he took at the end of Apokolips War, namely sending the DCAMU Flash back to when Darkseid was a baby with the intent to kill the still-innocent child and infecting Barry with a spell that would still kill li’l Darkseid when Barry inevitably found himself morally unable to super-shake an infant to death. Apparently, Darkseid is so vital to the universe itself that his death fractured reality and created the multiverse that our characters inhabit, which set this whole bad situation into motion. Nice work as always, Constantine.
The third segment of this sprawl sees our heroes having used the release of energy from the Monitor’s death to somehow transport all of the remaining endangered Earths into The Bleed, an extradimensional “nowhere” that was featured in the Authority comics I mentioned back in Superman vs. The Elite. There’s a bunch of rigamarole involving an alternate Lex Luthor, but the (very) long and short of it is that each Earth in their brought with it their sun (sure) and that if a Superman absorbed the energy of all of the suns, it could be redirected to destroy the entity behind the (ahem) crisis, the Anti-Monitor, and everyone could go home. Wracked by guilt from having been manipulated into killing the Monitor, Supergirl chooses to sacrifice herself to this plan instead. This is all for naught, however, as it turns out that the Anti-Monitor is an “antibody” response from the larger whole of reality, as the aforementioned Darkseid infanticide fracture isn’t resolved simply by killing off one part of its immune response. The miracle machine that resolved the conflict of Legion of Superheroes is acquired, and it’s decided to merge all the different parallel realities back into one “monoverse” as the only possible solution, and everyone says their supposedly heartfelt goodbyes and jumps into the new universe, where all the alternate versions of each character merging into one single person on the new Earth. To its credit, this does manage to make that seem more hopeful than the CW adaptation did. Constantine, assuming he’s off for more of that eternal damnation that he’s always on about, also gets a new start, which—alongside the sweetness of Barry and Iris’s relationship and some of the scenes in that comment on the sadness and somberness of Wonder Woman’s immortality—is one of the few emotional touchpoints that actually work here.
If you look back at that third paragraph, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of “we learn” and “it’s revealed” going on. This is a text that is 50% “it’s revealed,” as it weaves together the apparently disparate threads of a pre-planned narrative from movies it’s been rapidly spitting out for the prior three years, rushing headlong into this project with no reason to make it other than, well, if you’re making DC stuff, you’ve just gotta do Crisis on Infinite Earths, right? You’ve just gotta. But the truth is that this is a terrible idea done for completely the wrong reason. The original comic came out in 1986 and was created specifically to simplify what had become a too-sprawling number of parallel Earths that DC’s continuity editors were supposed to keep consistent despite DC just buying out other comic book companies and sticking them in wherever. There was the “main Earth,” of course, and then there was “Earth-2,” where DC editorial had arbitrarily said all stories from the “Golden Age” had occurred. Then there was the Earth where all the Shazam (née Captain Marvel) characters lived, and the Earth where the Justice League was instead the dictatorial Crime Syndicate, Westworld Earths, Elseworld Earths, and so on and so forth. So 1986’s COIE was going to simplify everything, while DC Animated editorial decided to create and destroy a multiverse in about 15 hours. Making COIE purely for the sake of makingCOIE is a bonkers decision. There were, collectively, twenty-three seasons of television across six different television series before the CW committed to doing this as a concept, whereas this exists to tie different continuities together that didn’t need that at all, and it does it through exhaustive exposition.
The other 50% of this movie is nostalgia bait, but to be honest, it wouldn’t be Crisis without it. The original comic was published before I was born, and I learned about it when I started getting into comics in my adolescence; I got a copy of it from the library, and, despite having a mind that was a sponge for all of what I was reading, it was a dense and incomprehensible text to me as a nascent fan. Who the hell were all these people that I didn’t know from Justice League? Why were there two Supermen? Things like an alternate reality of evil Leaguers I could figure out from context, but what the hell was an Atomic Knight? But those appearances of characters that I would come to know better (and many I would not)—Blue Beetle, Negative Woman, Nightshade, truly too many to mention—weren’t for me, who wasn’t even a glimmer in my mother’s eye when it was published. It was for all the fans at the time, people who knew who Bartholomew Lash and Hourman when they were reading the thing forty years ago and got a little thrill out of seeing to-them familiar characters all in the pages of a single comic. I understand the thrill of that, but that’s most of all the media that is being produced lately, whether it’s Free Guy or Ready Player One or any of the hundreds of less-obvious pastiches of endless nostalgia-driven regurgitation. For most of the people who are going to watch this and enjoy it, that’s going to be the reason that they do—not because of the animation or the design or the character work, but because Terry McGinnis Batman is here. Some stilted, cliche interactions between “our” Batman and his adult daughter from an Earth that’s running a few decades ahead, including lots of “Well, my father” and “I’m not your father” repeated ad infinitum isn’t going to convince me that this needs to exist. You’re also not winning me over by erasing the parallel world where Batman: The Animated Series and its associated works takes place, then dedicating the movie to Kevin Conroy. I guess some people find this touching because it was the last thing Conroy recorded before he died, but it feels ghoulish to me.
There were moments when I never thought we would reach the end of this, but here we are. Please don’t expect more of these. This little comic newsstand, like most newsstands outside of metropolitan airports, is closing for business. I didn’t have a good time, and I have no one but myself to blame, but I will take pride in managing to get through all of these in a year with most of my sanity intact. I’d say “until next time,” but there’s not going to be a next time. Excelsior!
This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories. It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US. While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set. It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize. So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.
The Uninvited (1944)
1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing. More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted. One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff. The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost. While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that. It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.
Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions. Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering. It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game. They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them. Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks. Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave. The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus. They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.
Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways. From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss. Dying is just not that big of a deal. Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood. Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor. He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12. Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.
Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day. Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment. All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since. As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list. It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat. Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs. Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit. A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob. That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body. While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.
It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers. During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom. The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips. It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice. As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story. There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.
1. She is Conann – My favorite working director reshaped the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. No one else alive has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Bertrand Mandico has. He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery. There are allusions to luminary provocateurs herethat indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing a still-young artform to its most fantastic extremes.
2. I Saw the TV Glow – The melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon. It’s impossible not to read this VHS-warped dysphoria horror as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche, obsessive media consumption instead. It made me so sad that I felt physically ill, and then I immediately retreated into another movie screening so I wouldn’t think about it for too long.
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – A three-hour Romanian art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.
4. Mars Express – A great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Minority Report & Terminator 2 anymore, but then its third act shoots for the stars in a way that distinguishes it from its obvious reference points through sheer dazzlement.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller’s action blockbuster sequel gives me the RRRtingles more often than it gives me the Fury Road tingles, which is honestly just as good. It’s large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen.
6. The People’s Joker– This fair-use Joker parody is the kind of direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the inner sanctums of its director’s brain. It’s not Vera Drew’s fault that the secret batcaves of her particular brain are wallpapered with copyrighted corporate media. We’ve all been mentally poisoned by pop culture iconography in that way, but most artists are too timid to engage with it in their work with this level of fearless vulnerability. It’s an impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture.
7. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” the most exciting thing about this apocalyptic hybrid-doc is finally getting to experience what it’s like to be Björk for an hour: finding infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations.
8. Memoir of a Snail– A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. There’s a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to Adam Elliot’s work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt, except Elliot thankfully borrows a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet whimsy to help cut the tension.
9. Cuckoo– Tilman Singer’s teen-angst freakout escalates the verbally conveyed psychedelia of his debut Luzto something more traditionally thrilling. He genre-hops from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintains the same screenwriting ambition of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools. It’s also a major triumph for audiences who’ve been waiting around for Dan Stevens & Hunter Schaeffer to be handed meatier material; our time is now.
10. Love Lies Bleeding – I went into this muscular erotic thriller expecting to swoon for its synths, sex, and biceps. I’m surprised to say that I was also emotionally invested in its central romance beyond those surface aesthetics, which was not as much of a given. Rose Glass amplifies everything that was exciting about her debut Saint Maud to grander effect, once again getting away with one of my least favorite genre filmmaking tropes (contextualizing all supernatural fantasy elements as dreams & delusions instead of them “really” happening), somehow making it feel like audacity rather than cowardice. It’s ripped, roided, and noided.
11. The Substance – There was a movie called Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo at Cannes a few years ago that got unanimously rotten reviews complaining that it’s just four relentless hours of young people’s gyrating butts. It never got US distribution, but Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is exactly what I imagined it looked like, except now with positive reviews and surrealistic gore effects from Screaming Mad George.
12. Aishiteru! (Safe Word) – A semi-pink mockumentary about a pro-wrestling pop idol who gets recruited as a dominatrix because she can’t stop playing heel. Whatever dramatic authenticity is lost in its sub-professional production values is made up for in its intense fixations on sexual power dynamics & subcultural detail. If you have any entry-level interest in wrestling, pop, or kink, this is a thrilling, endearing journey through their backrooms & dungeons.
13. Kinds of Kindness – The sinister absurdism of this New Orleans-set anthology drama convinced me that Yorgos Lanthimos would be just as effective as a playwright as he is as a filmmaker, which I can’t believe never occurred to me before. More urgently, a lot of it was shot in the immediate area where I work & live, which was uncomfortable because I don’t want any of the creeps he’s dreamed up anywhere near me.
14. A Different Man – Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible. It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.
15. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed – Joanna Arnow delivers the driest humor you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about an autofictional BDSM romcom where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.
16. Anora– This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.
17. The Beast – A sci-fi fantasy horror about falling for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of your past & future lives, and all that changes is the temporal context in which he sucks. It’s one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to take entirely seriously, until director Bertrand Bonello tips his hand a little by making you watch pop-up ad clips from Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.
18. Nosferatu – Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale. As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.
19. Longlegs – This supernatural serial killer thriller feels convincingly Evil and gives Nicolas Cage free rein to be erratically Intense. Call me a simple man, but that’s more than enough for me. The Oz Perkins directorial project continues an upward trend.
20. In a Violent Nature – A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. It’s very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).
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